Teach Me to Live
by Igenlode Wordsmith
Summary: Tormented by grief and lost chances, Raoul de Chagny makes the weary journey homewards with his wife's body to the final legacy of their life together.
1. Help Me Say Goodbye

_A/N: This story is set after the end of the Australian Version: it is not, however (for reasons that will become very evident...) a sequel to "Waiting in the Wings". _

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**Chapter 1: Help Me Say Goodbye **

"Father dear—" It was the old chirping demand; but Gustave's face, upturned an instant ago to Raoul's own, was turned suddenly away as he broke off. He had all too obviously remembered.

The boy stood scuffling at the stones of the quayside, staring down at the battered toes of the boots he was fast outgrowing, and Raoul drew breath without thinking as so often before to upbraid him. _Stand straight, child, for God's sake—_

And the instinctive glance that went with that impulse: the appeal, all too often in vain, for Christine's support. For a moment he had almost swung round to find her.

Her face in his mind's eye smiled down at Gustave, gentle, a little weary, interposing as always between childish impulse and adult impatience. "Raoul, darling—"

Five days. She had been dead for five days, and still he heard her voice. Looked for her at his elbow. Wakened to the silence of the breathing that was not there at night.

And now on the docks of New York, in his last parting with her son, angry habit betrayed him again when he'd thought the pain numbed for a moment.

_Father dear, play with me — listen to my music — see what I made with Nounou — father, father—_

All the demands of a small boy, heaped time and again on unheeding or unwilling ears. Raoul had been young enough to want his wife to himself in those first years of marriage; to resent the prior claims of that new arrival, the wedding-night child whose swelling presence had been thrust between them almost before they'd known it, conceived in that first clumsy rush of passion...

Or so he'd thought. So Christine had prayed, perhaps — had hoped.

How _could_ she? Oh, how could she have — how could she ever—

The blind pain of that had eaten into him night after night since disbelief had ebbed its final defences. It had been a lie, then: ten years shared together had been built on sand. Ten years when he'd never doubted... and yet he _could_ not doubt her, even now, looking back, even with the knowledge of that defilement stark across the bridal hour. She had chosen to give her heart. And maybe it had been a willed choice, maybe Raoul could only ever be second best, but she had given her love where she gave her hand, and in the years when he had deserved it and the years when he had not she had given it without stint and without reserve.

And in these past days of enforced proximity and waiting — while the formalities were gone through, the cargo booked, the passage paid — he'd learned enough of those last bitter hours to know the loyalty she'd shown to the life they'd made together. She'd denied the Phantom once and then again. She'd meant to take the boy, take her secret and go: go home. It was his own folly, he told himself savagely, his own drunken insecurity that had delivered his rival a final, fatal chance — and delivered her to death in another man's arms.

Now she lay cold and embalmed in the hold of the ship that was to carry him away, and still memory set her warmth just beyond his reach and the light touch of her glove in the curve of his arm. They'd stood together like this on the dockside at Le Havre with the liner's great hull towering over them. He'd been short-tempered with worry — over the arrangements, over the servants and Anne, over Christine's voice and the antics of Gustave, who was to come with them — when she had reached up to smooth his frown with her fingertips, teasing it away with little gloved kisses that promised the sweetness of her mouth... and he'd turned away.

That knowledge was bitter now, curdled like so many other might-have-beens. He'd taken so much for granted. Assumed, always, there would be a better time, another opportunity when they were not both busy and on edge and distracted.

He'd turned away from what he might have had, and now the dictates of Society would have him wipe it from his life as if it had never been. Errant wives were not to be spoken of: mothers who cavorted with lovers were dead to the children left behind from the day they first eloped. No-one in Paris would speak of Christine once they knew what had happened... at least, not to his face. No-one would mourn.

Society had mocked at a Vicomte who married a chorus-girl, an opera-dancer fit only to be a rich patron's plaything. Society would smile in triumph to see that reputation borne out at last.

But he had never, from the day that he was fourteen, cared what Society might think of Christine Daaé.

He ought to hate her, he knew, for what she had done. For the son that was not his, and renewed betrayal in the arms of the mountebank whose consuming power she had once learned to dread. By all Society's dictates, he ought to hate her; but he had sworn to make her happy and failed her, and he would have crawled to her feet to beg forgiveness now.

He had knelt there once and felt her mouth awaken on his, and believed they had another chance. If he had found more strength — if she had come to him — if somehow he had only loved her enough, she would be alive today: the knowledge ate at his heart.

He would have died to bring her back. So would Mr. Y: it was the sole unspoken thought they had in common, a rivalry of grief that remained by mutual consent unacknowledged. But they were both held back by responsibility to a child: her child.

~o~

The ship's whistle brayed high above him, and Raoul flinched and cursed his own shattered nerves. Not drink: not this time. He hadn't touched a drop since that night. It was one reason why he slept so badly.

The crowd around them was flowing more purposefully now, and scarves and hats were being waved from the towering boat deck, waking a fluttering tide of reply.

"I need to go." For the moment he was almost grateful for the interruption: Gustave, head averted, was still scuffing one foot, and the memory of that "Father" — cold mockery now — still hung between them.

But what else in heaven's name was the boy to call him? Even before these last few years they'd both known well enough that Christine's first-born would never hold the favoured place in his heart; but Raoul had been father enough for all that, hadn't he? He'd carried the boy; he'd dealt with his endless questions; he'd been there to see him clothed and fed and tutored. He'd sent him to bed, woken him in the morning, and known a pang at the likeness between the sleeping face with its long lashes and Christine's dreamy features by the firelight when he'd first known her.

He'd had "Father" clamoured in his ears for the child's whole lifetime. What was he supposed to hear from Gustave now?

His rival called him "Monsieur le Vicomte", with punctilious biting courtesy: to hear the echo of that from the boy would be more mockery than he could bear. "Monsieur de Chagny" from a child he'd known in his cradle was a slap in the face. And "Raoul" plain and simple was an intimacy that had no place on any lips but hers...

The ropes on the foot of the gangway were being unlashed now, and stewards were ushering visitors up from the cabins, voices echoing in response. Raoul cleared his throat hesitantly, with a glance at the bustle above.

"Gustave, I need to leave. If there's anything you want—"

The defiant fist the boy dragged across his eyes left a damp streak as he looked up. "I want to see Nounou again. And Anne. And Minette. And Zazie—"

Zazie was the striped donkey in the day-nursery, Raoul remembered, after a groping moment of panic. He fell back on platitudes. "Well, maybe we can send Zazie over to you by ship. But you'll have lots of toys on Coney Island, you know. And Minette can't go in a parcel — she wouldn't like it. She's getting to be a big cat now..."

Both of them had reverted unthinking to the baby talk of years ago, from an era when Gustave had reigned as the unquestioned small tyrant of the household without rivals or discipline. Raoul caught the echo of his own words and flushed, feeling a fool. But child of his or not — Christine's wishes or not — did he have the right to leave a boy of ten alone in a foreign land among strangers, away from the only home and family he'd ever known?

Gustave was wanted here; very much wanted. Raoul had seen the Phantom's eyes clinging to the child from behind the mask with an awkward devotion that he had been forced to admit — between gritted teeth — was more than he, in the shocked void of his own loss, could offer. The man was wealthy and to all appearances successful. Gustave would have the whole of Coney Island as a plaything, and every whim that money could buy.

The boy was getting too old for nurses, Raoul assured himself, thrusting down the guilt that told him he was abandoning Christine's son. He would soon forget his Nounou and find new playmates his own age...

"And Anne?" Gustave was insisting unhappily as if he could read his father's mind. "Mother said she wasn't to come. Can she come next year?"

_No_. Raoul had thought he'd plumbed the depths of horror five days ago on Coney Island, but the idea of the Phantom so much as setting eyes on her wrenched guilty places in his soul he'd thought numb beyond repair. Oh God — if he got the idea—

"You're not to talk about it — do you understand?" Propelled by fear, it came out harsher than he'd intended, and he winced as Gustave's face closed in on itself in familiar sullen retreat.

"Listen — Mr. Y—" A desperate attempt to regain lost ground. "He cares for you a lot, Gustave. You don't want to make him unhappy — you don't want to talk about your old home all the time."

Gustave nodded, looking down again.

"We... we talked about Mother last night, before I went to bed. And he"—the boy swallowed, uncertain—"he cried."

_What right has he to wallow, to subject the boy—_ Raoul bit his lip, choking down distaste with an effort. Perhaps — the thought stole in painfully — perhaps if he had been able to show his own heart to Christine in front of the boy, Gustave's birth need not have come between them as it had. And perhaps they could have found more comfort in each other in the bad times.

"Monsieur le Vicomte." The voice was smooth and resonant, and as hatefully beautiful as in the horror of his sweat-filled dreams. Despite himself, Raoul jumped like a startled cat and cursed, not quite under his breath. As if he'd really thought the man would not be watching Gustave every moment the Vicomte de Chagny was near him — as if the Phantom would ever trust him with his son at all.

Time had taken its toll on them all: it was no longer, at least, a voice that one could have mistaken for an angel, Raoul told himself in a moment's arid comfort. Unless, of course, one was a sheltered girl of twenty with a head full of legends of the North...

The cold, gloved hand on his elbow swung him round in a merciless grip. But it was not the pang of that icy grasp that had driven Raoul's breath in its inward hiss.

"Well?" He swallowed memories of her and found his own voice commendably steady, letting mockery bite. "Am I accused of abduction, perhaps? An intent to take what is not mine?"

He let his other hand rest on Gustave's shoulder, deliberately, and saw contempt flicker behind the mask in the moment before he felt the boy flinch. A stab of self-knowledge, to be choked down in turn. It was not he — had never been he — who had begun this game, or made a pawn out of a grieving child.

The mask glanced smoothly up the quayside, and the grip on his arm propelled him inexorably round in turn.

"It would be a shame, Vicomte, if you were to miss your passage. I believe the soil of America can spare your presence at last..."

"Why — do you fear for the boy's loyalties?" Goaded as ever beyond finesse, Raoul struck out, and won a flash of anger in response.

"Believe me, I find your continued existence a matter of complete indifference. But I will not have _my Christine_ left to travel unescorted—"

Raoul caught his breath, betrayed into a half-sob. "She was my wife, damn you — my wife!"

Ten years. He'd had a wife, a family, for ten years, and this man — this creature — could not say the same. And now the Phantom's victory was hollow, utterly hollow for both of them... and all the vows of marriage came down to nothing now but six foot of brass-handled oak in a cold packing case.

Under the law, she was his still. His — to bring home and to bury, by kind forbearance of the master of Phantasma. A fair exchange, after all: a dead wife for a living heir.

Ten years. He'd had ten years: his rival had had half an hour. And between them they'd brought her to her death as if it had been meant all along, he by surrender and the other by jealous possession. It was that day beneath the Opera House all over again. _All for you, Christine, and all for nothing—_

Around them heads had turned at his outburst, and for a moment they'd found themselves ringed by a curious crowd; but whistles were blowing overhead, and the last travellers were hastening past before the gangplank was swayed up. His blind bludgeoning had led them only to this: this aching silence.

"Go." The Phantom released him abruptly, with a thrust that sent Raoul stumbling forward. "Make your goodbyes—"

And Gustave's hand was suddenly small and hot in his own. Raoul dropped to one knee and held Christine's son close against his shoulder. He'd never known how to talk to the boy: all he could think now at the last was that she, somehow, would have known what to say...

"Father—" The voice was muffled against his coat, and Raoul tightened his grip, turning the child's face upwards.

"Father, is — is Mother an angel now?"

Raoul swallowed, hard.

"Yes, Gustave." His own voice was muffled. "That's just what she is. Your very own angel."

Angel of Music... but he could not say it. His rival had wanted this: let him be the one to do it, then. Let him play father and mother both — let him tell the old, comforting lies.

Gustave drew back a little, meeting his gaze. "And... shall I see you again?"

"Yes, of course." The assurance came almost easily this time, untruth covered with a smile. "Of course you will."

He stood up hastily, dusting off the grime of the quayside. "And now I really must go."

He wouldn't be back, he knew that — unless by the charity of Mr. Y. Debts mounted; and he would be needed now, needed too sorely at home. Without Christine—

The future stared him in the face, impossible, unbearable. But there was Anne... and he had to go on.

"Goodbye, Gustave." He kissed the boy lightly as Christine would have done, and stepped back a little shamefaced. The gaze of the white mask seemed to hold a mocking irony.

"Monsieur, I bid you farewell. Do you think that I would harm him?" The murmur was for Raoul's ears alone, and he flushed stiffly.

"For her sake"—he flung it back in the same undertone—"that's all I ask of you."

They were starting to raise the gangplank. He had run long ago for Christine's sake, as a boy of fourteen. He ran again now.

Behind him, the other two were silent. Gustave's hand slid upwards, hesitantly, into the long fingers of the man who was his father.


	2. Unending Night

**Chapter 2: Unending Night**

Raoul awoke with a stifled cry from a dream that he could not remember and lay awake, sweating, in the dark. There was blood — blood on his hand — and Christine's face falling back, pallid and sunken—

_No_. He got a grip on himself. He was awake. It was just a dream, just another dream. Just one more of the little souvenirs that were a madman's gift from the time before their wedding...

The bedclothes had inexplicably closed in on him. He flung out an arm towards the other side of the sheets, seeking the comfort of his wife's cool shoulder, found only emptiness, and struck against the washstand with jolting force that brought him finally and most horribly awake.

The dream... had been real. Memory was flooding back now, racking him with shudders despite the sweat. Christine's death... was real. It was the wakening, the moments when night after night he believed himself back beside her, believed for an instant that the whole thing was one more nightmare — it was dreaming that he was awake that was the most cruel deceit of all.

His hand ached dully where he had cracked it against the porcelain bowl. The lurching dark around him was a tiny shared cabin in the bowels of an Atlantic liner, its folding washstand barely an arm's-length from his narrow bed. Overhead in the upper berth the old Jew Groscek snored lightly, his steady breathing catching briefly with a sigh as he settled deeper into the bedding, and then resuming its gentle rasp.

They'd exchanged maybe ten words in the course of the last three days; the old man had his own troubles, Raoul suspected, but he showed no inclination to confide, and by mutual agreement they had left one another alone. It was a reticence for which Raoul was grateful, in those moments when his thoughts gave him any peace at all.

There was no porthole, and the air down here was close and far too warm. A dim line of light around the door told Raoul that the night-bulbs were still burning in the passageway outside; it was too dark to be certain, but he guessed there were hours to go before dawn. The sounds of the ship around him — the sullen beat of the engines like the throbbing of a vein at his temples, the shifting groan of plates and frames against the waves — had a dull, muffled note that he knew too well. It was the sound of sleepless watches without the echo of feet or voices: the sounds of empty passages and rows of closed doors.

He rolled over with a groan in the unaccustomed, too-narrow berth, remembering against his will hot nights in Paris, with shutters flung wide and limbs sprawled beneath a single sheet across the broad plains of their bed. Remembered that summer four years back, when the city baked in the heat for week after week until the roofs began to shimmer, and Christine had tossed sleepless at his side. She hadn't complained; but she had grown listless and pale, snappish and heavy-eyed, and they'd quarrelled over nothing and everything in outbursts that left her shaking and in tears.

Gustave had been six, and their marriage had already been on the rocks. He saw that now, with the clear, unforgiving vision that comes too late.

But he'd understood even then that something was wrong; had written to Tante Emilie in Lannion and had taken Christine with him, just the two of them for one last time. Gustave, thriving in the heat, had been left behind. He had his nurse and a houseful of servants — he could manage without his mother for a few short weeks, Raoul had insisted, and found a tame doctor to promise that Madame's health might depend upon it.

It might even have been true. He didn't know. Knew only that those weeks in Brittany, among the tall houses nestled above the winding Léguer, had been a shy courtship all over again.

The sun shone with the same force in Lannion among its hills, but the breezes of the West bore the scent of grass and enduring granite, and his aunt — ancient now, and withered, but with the same bright eye that had quelled a boy who had come home dripping with salt but unrepentant — made them welcome with all the kindness of those summers long ago. He'd watched the colour come back into Christine's cheeks, and re-learned the curve of her waist within his arm and the weight of her head against his shoulder as they walked the steep streets together through jostling market crowds or alone in the soft dusk. He'd sat with her in the window of their airy room at sunset, as the birds called overhead and the mists gathered by the river below and the scent of her hair was full of warm promise.

Together, one day, they'd walked the six miles through the lanes down to the sands at Trestraou, and swung, hot and thirsty, down the final hill through a rash of new-built villas to the sea. The great sweep of sand was no longer as empty as it had been when they were children, and Parisian fashions and laughter fluttered along the sea-front: but the waves and the sky stretched out as widely as ever, and Christine, greatly daring, had shed stockings and boots and run down to quench aching toes in the ripples at the water's edge. Raoul, struggling with knotted laces, had called after her, laughing.

And they'd traded kisses at last with tiny waves about their feet, washed by cool water like the ebb and flow of her mouth against his, hesitant and melting all at once. There had been onlookers on the shore. But for those few brief weeks of summer, none of that had seemed to matter any more.

He'd lain awake at Tante Emilie's that night with her weight clasped close against his heart, listening to the distant owls call and feeling the light stir of her breath against his breast as she slept.

Christine; Christine... Tangled sheets and sweat-dampened curls—

Raoul rolled over again with a catch in his breath, and lay sleepless in the dark, staring blindly upward.

The heat had broken at last that year with great clouds mounting over Brest, towering piles drifting inward over the coast to fill the night with thunder. They'd gone back to Paris — a Paris washed clean, silver-grey city beneath autumn skies — back to Gustave, grown shy and a little distant, so that Christine, remorseful, devoted herself to him more than ever... and in a while, as the threads of their lives resumed, it had seemed no more than a dream.

Save for Anne.

Anne, who had come waltzing into their lives since those weeks at Lannion, to Christine's initial consternation and Raoul's surprised, fierce delight. Sainte-Anne, whose innocence and laughter were all that Christine's once had been... and whose eyes had met his, in that clear bright spring, with a shock of knowledge and wonder that still left him shaken to the bone. He had not known that such things could be. Christine had Gustave, after all... and it was not the same.

Nothing had been quite the same after Anne had come. And nothing, now, would be the same ever again.

His wife had not been his, after all, he told himself brutally, listening to old Groscek's steady sleep up above. If he had failed her, and failed her, and failed her again... she had betrayed him, hadn't she? Betrayed him with an intimacy that hurt bitterly even now. He could have cast her off, if he had known.

But he would not. He knew that too, with a desperate, aching certainty that tore him apart.

Nothing — not Anne's existence, not even Gustave's — could change what Christine meant to him, even when they hurt each other the most. If she had come to him on their wedding day, if she had _trusted_ him... she could have had his name, his life, his shelter for her child, whatever she had done.

If she had told him the truth. It came down to that, didn't it? For she had lied, lied as only women could lie, with loving words and gentleness and evasions that were all a lovesick fool could desire...

Christine... No. He would not believe that. He could not believe that. He had flung one arm uselessly across his eyes; he turned again into the pillow, the linen clammy against his cheek. The covers were twisted about him now, ensnaring and binding like coils of rope—

_Him_. It had been _him_. Using her fear, using her compassion. He, Raoul, had seen them together, hadn't he? Seen the power his rival held over her, heard the allure and beauty of that voice. Christine was not to be won through power or possession... but pity, now — a broken creature, ruined by love...

He remembered against his will tears of his own, woken from nightmare against the soft silk of her shoulder. Remembered her young body entwining his for comfort, gathering, soothing: remembered passion that had shaken both of them in the joining that had followed.

That was how it must have been, he told himself fiercely. She'd been an innocent. She'd given herself, allowed liberties... she hadn't known what she was doing. And the blame — the blame lay in the man who'd trapped her with weeping deceit, the man whose power she'd feared and fled when she thought him strong, whose weakness alone could have caught her unaware...

If he told himself that often enough, he might even come to think it true. Raoul bit his lip, desperate for honesty in the dark. Easy to make a monster and bray childish defiance, is it not, monsieur le Vicomte? Easy to cast her as a puppet, the woman you love: to deny her will and her choice and her consent...

Around his neck the thin chain galled in reminder, bearing her wedding ring — his ring.

The Phantom had slipped it from her finger in silence, that face still racked with unspeakable grieving, and held it out, and Raoul had taken it back without a word, in a gesture that both of them knew set her free. She belonged to no man; and the chains, now, were his.

He'd stood there for hours out on the pier that night, after they'd taken Gustave away, after Meg — poor damaged Meg, as much a victim as any of the rest — had brought the doctors and the stretcher and every kind of help she could find, and broken down in wild sobbing when there was nothing to be done. The police had come, taken a bribe, and gone.

_Carny folk... dime a dozen._ The words were alien, but the echo of dismissal in the tone was all too familiar: 'Raoul and the soubrette'... and the little snigger that went with it. All her talent, all her heartbreak — nothing more than a cheap stage stunt gone wrong.

The alternative was sensation, he knew that, and the cheap Press swarming like blow-flies to a carcase. Adultery, illegitimacy, aristocracy: melodrama no scandal-sheet could resist.

And so he'd turned his back, dry-eyed and hopeless, and jerked out the few banal lies that had been required. Stood there while the murky water welled and sucked below and behind him the cover-up began, with a practised ease that suggested this was not, after all, the first time...

Mr. Y had friends in high places, it seemed. Or perhaps in low places.

They'd been very efficient, Fleck, Gangle and Squelch. They'd taken care of their master and of the child and of all the flotsam left behind... and they would have taken care of the Vicomte de Chagny if he had allowed it. There had been kindness in the plucking hands of the little freak-woman, and understanding in her voice, and he had believed for a moment that he might break down at last — but he had not wept for Christine, not on that night or any night. It seemed he could not.

So he'd ignored Fleck and her urgings, and she'd left him alone. Alone to stand there on the pier when all the rest had gone, as the lights of Coney Island flickered out one by one towards the dawn, with Christine's wedding ring clutched in his hand hard enough to brand him to the bone.

He'd thought of dropping it into the water, to lie among the crabs and the weed and the fish that nibbled at dead men's toes. He'd thought, more than once that night, of the few short steps that would have taken him over the edge in turn — not in expiation, for nothing could do that, but in the simple surcease of oblivion.

But he had turned from the sea instead at first light, and gone back stiff and aching to the room they'd shared, and stripped off his coat to lie down, with the mechanical movements of exhaustion. It was then for the first time that he'd seen the blood on his hand where he'd held her; blood, dark and matted, on the fine cloth of his sleeve. Christine's life, in a stiffening stain...

He'd doubled over, found the pot under the bed with moments to spare, and thrown up.

The rest was a blur. He'd woken at some point in cramped misery upon the bed with the ring still clenched against his palm. At some point, in the days that followed, he'd bought the cheap American chain that held it now like the chafe of a scapular against his throat.

"Think of it, Raoul, a secret engagement—" Another chain, another ring, nestling in warm shadow where decency could not see; her voice had been laughing, a little breathless, with an undertone of fear he had never truly understood until it had been too late. He'd promised her love, light and safety — but of all those, only love had been his to give.

Raoul lay awake now in the endless night, and slid up one hand to grip that slim discarded band — the closed loop of their marriage — in penance and unthinking defiance.

He'd taken back the ring and signed all the papers set before him, concerning Christine, concerning Gustave. His name was still needed, for a final few days. The rest of him was not.

Those moments had begun as necessary negotiation and ended as purgatory and confessional both, a strange fellowship of grief and hate held together by the thread of the Phantom's voice. He had not wanted to hear — he thought the other man had not wanted to speak. But the need had been stronger than either of them.

He knew himself despised in remorseless detail — on that at least they were agreed — for what he had squandered. Knew now how bitterly he was envied: for youth, for hope, for an unmarred face... for Christine. For the years of Christine which he had not deserved.

And now she was a hollow shell who belonged to neither of them. Love... love was not an opera. Love was not gambled or deserved. Love was a life lived together. Love was _given_, and Christine had given it for all her years without counting the cost.

There should have been so many more years... The ring was tight in his hand, and he needed a drink — needed the oblivion he had learnt to crave. But if he once fell down that slope now he did not think he would ever come up again.

He had turned away from the easy road that night on the pier. He was still loved — still wanted. He had to believe that, and come safely home. Christine would have wanted it. And Anne... Anne would never understand.

Raoul closed weary eyes and waited yet again for the dawn.


	3. To Hold Me and to Hide Me

**Chapter 3: To Hold Me and to Hide Me**

They met rough weather on the last day of the voyage, and were three hours late in docking. Raoul, with the hesitant intimacy of shipboard acquaintance, found himself offering to assist old Groscek with his baggage on the quay: the single case was meagre enough, and the old Jew had less chance than most of catching the eyes of the overworked porters amid the crowd. The docks were rainswept and chill, and the other man was shivering in a too-thin overcoat.

"That's very kind of you, monsieur." Groscek yielded his burden with a grimace of relief. "They say there is a good commercial hotel in the rue de Chaverie — there may be rooms enough there—"

He glanced around at the stranded, sullen passengers, and up again at Raoul a little awkwardly. "I have accommodation reserved, monsieur. It's not much, but if you are in need for the night..."

The old man evidently had a pretty fair idea of the state of his pockets. Raoul overcame a moment of instinctive negation, flushing, and managed a few words of acknowledgement, touched by the gesture.

"Much obliged, but there's a late train — I'll wait. I'm expected in town, and..." The words caught unexpectedly in his throat. "My wife's remains—"

It was the first time he had spoken of it to a stranger. He turned aside to forestall the inevitable pity, the facile words of sympathy that convention would dictate. There would be a long-lost Gretl or Lena, no doubt...

"I had... wondered," Groscek said quietly from beside him. They walked on for a few minutes towards the gate in silence. "Then I can only give thanks for the strength of your arm, monsieur."

He laid a hand on Raoul's sleeve. "If you could set the bag down here, by the side of the road..."

A heavy dray rolled past on the route into town, spattering them both, but the old man did not move. "I can find a conveyance from here... and I would not keep you longer from your duty to your wife."

Raoul met his gaze at last. There was pity in it, a vast dignified sorrow that somehow did not encroach, and he held out his hand on impulse in sympathy of his own.

Groscek took it with a moment's brief pressure and released him. "You should go to her, monsieur."

Raoul bent his head in acknowledgement and turned to go. He glanced back once, halfway down the quayside. But the solitary figure waiting had not moved.

~o~

His own possessions, piled haphazardly by the tracks as they had been unloaded, made a pitiful showing in the damp. Of all that hopeful mountain of baggage they'd taken to America, little enough, it seemed, had ever been his.

There'd been a whole trunk of Gustave's clothes, for all weathers and all occasions, packed up at the last minute when he'd yielded to Christine's pleading for the boy to come too — oh God, if only he had not. If only...

Cases and cases of costumes for Christine: gala dresses, old hats newly trimmed, last year's fashions re-cut and stitched to bring them up to date, so that the Vicomtesse de Chagny should not be shamed in the face of the Astors or the Vanderbilts. No: so that the Vicomte should not be shamed.

Christine had not cared. Christine had been happy in an old tea-gown, with her hair tumbling at her throat. Christine's beauty had graced every jewel he had ever given her, yet she had sold them again for his sake without blame or regret.

And Raoul's life, stripped from the sum of hers and Gustave's, amounted now to no more than a few shabby bags... and a lead-lined casket.

Mr. Y's charity had included a second-class travel warrant for Paris. The late train, when it was finally formed up, proved to have no passenger accommodation.

Raoul, weary to the bone, sought and obtained permission to remain with his consignment due to the nature of the load; the conductor offered hot coffee with a seat in the brake car and garrulous sympathy. The coffee would have been welcome.

He jolted eastwards through the dusk in a half-daze, shivering. Towards midnight, alone with the lantern in the darkened van, he found himself talking to Christine, resting his aching head against the box which held her as if she could hear him there. He was not far enough gone to believe it — yet.

But the words came more and more easily, whispered against that rough wooden pillow: memories of the life he'd promised her, of the future they'd planned, of childhood and friendship and love. A child come too soon, and a child adored. Music had brought her to him and stolen her away; become a mystery where he could no longer follow. And now she was gone further than he could ever hope to find her...

_What do I do now, Christine? What are we to do?_ No answer. There would never be an answer for them again.

Wheels rumbled on, counting kilometres slowly, inexorably away. Raoul drifted into uneasy dreams and woke at last, that rhythm still beating through his brain, as the van door slid open and lantern-light rocked across his face.

"Paris, monsieur."

Formalities, stumbled through with a sleepy clerk.

The first market wagons — the last stumbling revellers: no-one in the streets spared him a glance. Their house when he came to it was shuttered as if for a funeral, quiet before the dawn.

At the door there was a long wait until Baptiste in hastily-donned livery could pull back the bolts, heavy-eyed. He caught sight of himself in the tall pier-glass behind the manservant's shoulder, with the same shock he'd seen swiftly veiled beneath the man's professional mask: it was a face he barely knew. Haggard, unshaven, old.

"If monsieur le Vicomte would like breakfast—"

The man was about to raise the whole household for his convenience, no doubt. Raoul waved the suggestion aside — he couldn't remember when he had last eaten — seeing his home through new eyes as the auctioneer would assess it. That mirror was tarnished, its frame chipped. The table in the hall was old-fashioned, clumsy in the Louis-Philippe style. The balusters on the half-landing were battered and worn where Gustave's toy horse had crashed against them too many times; the heavy drapes at the window were threadbare even by gaslight.

It would all have to go, of course. As would the servants: behind Baptiste's solicitations he could hear the obsequious contempt of three months' wages still unpaid. Without Christine, the creditors would come swarming. Without Christine, he was no longer sure he even cared.

Without Christine... It swept over him again, and he caught his breath. "Does _she_ know?"

Baptiste was tugging at the buttons of his overcoat; fussing with his scarf. Raoul thrust him off impatiently. "Does she know — Anne? Miss Anne? Has she been told?"

He was halfway to the sweep of the staircase already, not waiting for the answer. Baptiste had moved to detain him, correct and disapproving; he'd never held with his master's unseemly attitude to Miss Anne, let alone at this hour.

"She's been told, of course, monsieur. But whether she understands..." A shrug. "One cannot say: Monsieur knows how these things are. She still asks for Madame."

A moment of softening in that rigid back: even among the servants, Christine had been beloved. It was a gift Raoul too had once possessed. Had lost, as he had lost the right to all else.

He took the steps two at a time, ignoring stiffened limbs and Baptiste's words of protest. It was his house, after all, and the nursemaids were in his employ. He could enter if he chose.

Old Nounou, vast and mob-capped in her nightrail, started up from her bed, catching at his arm and scolding, as he flung open the nursery door. He held her off with placatory words and turned up the light; but all his thought was only for Anne.

Anne, sitting upright in the little bed by the window, with her mother's hair, her mother's eyes. Anne, holding wondering arms out towards him with the confidence of one who has always been most deeply loved. Anne, who was all that remained to him in this life...

Somehow, he had crossed the stumbling distance that separated them and her arms were round his neck as he knelt, hugging tight. Her small body was held close against his, and tangled curls brushed his sleeve. Raoul buried his face in her covers — the child who had stolen his heart from the moment she was born — and felt the dam break at last.

"Don't cry, Papa — don't cry." The little fingers above him touched his hair hesitantly, as her mother used to do. "Maman will make it better. Maman will come soon, you'll see."

"Oh, Anne..." He was not sure if his heart would break, or if it had already broken. _Please pretend — she will understand, Christine; she will understand in time..._

~o~

The sun rose, slowly, over the rooftops beyond. Behind shuttered windows Anne-Élisabeth de Chagny held her father in the strange world of adult grief, and waited for him to come back to her.

There would be flowers on the breakfast-table, she thought. There were always flowers when her Papa came home — and he loved her more than anything in the whole world, except Maman. Except, of course, Maman.


End file.
